The image data object is designed to interpolate well into the FITS standard as well and provide any useful information to the system.
The Image structure must contain the flowing:

fits_head
A string of 2880 characters. This contains the header for the image to be written to a FITS file. You should write this using the fits_head() function.

bitpix
The number of bits per pixel

pix_format
A variable of the type data_format which specifies the exact the type of data contained in payload.

rows
The integer number of rows in the two dimensional image

columns
The integer number of columns in the image

payload
This is the image data itself in the format specified by the pix_format variable, it is recommended you use a void pointer to specify an address for data start.

flags
A string of flag characters that is used to indicate information about the image, this information can be arbitrary, however the first ten characters of flag are reserved for the driver and the second ten are reserved for the program. It is strongly recommended that any thing your program or driver places in the flag string be documented to the fullest extent possible. Next:The pointing_object structure (a_pointing_object) Up:Data Structures Previous:Data Structures
Aaron Smith
2004-03-04